flow

Use Cases / Donation Campaigns

Video-led giving.
Donation campaigns, on WhatsApp.

Lead with story, not ask. A short founder video lands the why; a cadence of fresh videos every few days builds the case. The moment they donate, the workflow shuts up & says thank you.

£50k+Raised in one campaign

4.1×Conversion vs email-only

71%Video play-through rate

Platform

HubSpot

Stripe

Category

Fundraising Communication

Industry

Charity & Non-profit

Workflow steps

Trigger: Campaign list join
Channels: WhatsApp video
5 steps · branched

The workflow

The blueprint.

Five sends, one branch, one goal. Square cards = HubSpot actions. Donation detected anywhere along the way exits the appeal track and routes the supporter to a thank-you video — never another donate-now message in this campaign.

Build it in Flowella now Try the supporter view

app.flowella.io / workflows / donation-campaigns

WhatsApp templates

Copy that actually gets watched.

Three approved templates carry the appeal: the founder hook, the beneficiary story, and the deadline urgency send. Submit them once to Meta — Flowella merges the variables & the video at send time.

tmpl_donate_video_01 Founder hook

Day 0 · The why

Your Brand

Tim here — just two minutes of your time. Here's why we need you in our corner this week.

14:32✓✓

Donate now

Business · online

CategoryMarketing

Localeen_GB

tmpl_donate_video_02 Beneficiary story

Day 3 · The impact

Your Brand

, this is Sarah — last winter your support kept her family on the land. Two minutes, in her words.

14:32✓✓

Watch & donate

Business · online

CategoryMarketing

Localeen_GB

tmpl_donate_video_03 Deadline & match

Day 6 · The urgency

Your Brand

Last 48 hours, . Every pound today is matched by a major donor — we're £4,200 off the goal.

14:32✓✓

Donate now Share with a friend

Business · online

CategoryMarketing

Localeen_GB

What it does

Five things that raised £25,000 while the inbox-only appeal was still warming up.

Sends video #1 immediately — founder to camera, 30–60 seconds, vertical, captioned for sound-off.

Waits 3 days, then video #2 — beneficiary story, different face, different angle, hard proof.

Waits 3 days, then video #3 — urgency, deadline, match-funding, donate button right in-thread.

Stops the moment a donation lands — Stripe / Enthuse webhook flips has_donated = true and the appeal exits.

Soft-closes the rest — a polite end-of-cycle send and a list segment for the next campaign — never a guilt-trip.

Deep dive

Why this play raised £50k+ — and how to push it further.

A guide to the mechanics behind donation campaigns on WhatsApp: why video destroys polished email appeals, the levers that drive lift, ways to extend the play to recurring giving and major donors, and the operational gotchas every charity hits in week one.

01 Why WhatsApp video wins for fundraising

Charity inboxes are graveyards. Open rates on supporter mailings have been declining for a decade and now sit at ~22% for warm lists, with most of the action happening in the first hour and almost none after day two. WhatsApp opens are 98% with median read time under two minutes — but the real unlock is video.

WhatsApp auto-plays the first frame of a vertical video in the chat preview. Supporters see a face, a place, a moment, before they decide whether to engage. A short, human-shot video from a founder, beneficiary or campaigner outperforms a polished email appeal by orders of magnitude — because it doesn't feel like an appeal, it feels like the person on the ground sending you a note.

98% open rate on first WA video vs ~22% for cold email.
71% play-through rate — the autoplay preview is the ad.
Vertical, captioned, <60s — the only spec that matters; phones are vertical and supporters watch on mute.
Story before ask — the donate button is the last beat, not the first frame.

Silent after "yes" — wire your Flow to the CRM milestone (donation cleared, booking confirmed, ticket closed) and let the thread go quiet the instant the job is done. No duplicate ask, no nudge — one trustworthy conversation people actually open next time.

02 How to enhance this workflow

The five-step blueprint is the floor, not the ceiling. Every charity that runs this for more than one campaign ends up layering in segmentation, recurring giving and major-donor flows — and the lift compounds with each cycle.

Recurring giving on the yes-branch — after the thank-you video, offer a one-tap monthly gift at 10% of the one-off amount.
Major-donor split — supporters with lifetime giving > £500 land on a parallel track with a personal video from the CEO, not the appeal cadence.
Match-funding ladder — pull match progress (e.g. match_remaining) into Video #3's caption to make urgency real.
Gift Aid in-thread — collect the Gift Aid declaration as a Flow on the thank-you, not a separate email later.
Multi-language video — submit the same template in EN/CY/GD for cause-specific regional appeals.
Beneficiary social-proof carousel — Video #2 can be a short carousel of three 15-second clips instead of one 60-second piece.

03 Tips, tricks & gotchas

The places charities get stuck are nearly always around video file size, donation-platform webhooks, and edge cases at the close of an appeal.

Keep video <16 MB — Meta's hard limit; compress vertical 9:16 H.264 at ~3 Mbps.
Submit templates 48 hours ahead — Meta's review for video templates is fast but not instant.
Idempotent donation webhooks — Stripe / Enthuse retry on failure; key your exit branch on the donation event ID, not a property write.
Honour STOP/UNSUBSCRIBE — write a global suppression branch; a re-asked supporter is a lost supporter.
Quiet hours — clamp sends to 9–18 in the supporter's timezone; donation appeals at 11pm get reported.
Match-end timing — schedule Video #3 to land 24 hours before the match-funding deadline, not the moment it closes.
Gift-aid record — stamp gift_aid_consent_at on the contact at thank-you for HMRC audit trail.

The meta-point: charity inboxes are graveyards, but supporters live in WhatsApp. The number that matters here isn't open rate; it's the ratio of people who watched the video to the people who acted on it. WhatsApp gets you the watch. Video gets you the act. The workflow exits the second the till rings — and that, more than anything else, is why supporters opt in to the next campaign.

Proof

What it looks like in the wild

Countryside Alliance

UK · 100k+ supporters

We sent a single founder video to our supporter list on WhatsApp. Inside ten days the campaign had raised over £25,000 — more than the previous email-led appeal had managed in a quarter.

Tim Bonner

Chief Executive, Countryside Alliance

Read case study ›

£50k+Raised in 10 days

4.1×vs email-led appeal

71%Video play-through

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Every Flowella use-case page is built from the same HubDB schema. Filter by platform, category, or industry to find the play that fits.

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Video-led giving.Donation campaigns, on WhatsApp.

The blueprint.

Copy that actually gets watched.

Five things that raised £25,000 while the inbox-only appeal was still warming up.

Why this play raised £50k+ — and how to push it further.

01 Why WhatsApp video wins for fundraising

02 How to enhance this workflow

03 Tips, tricks & gotchas

What it looks like in the wild

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Video-led giving.
Donation campaigns, on WhatsApp.